The most surprising thing about the sentiment expressed during the panel showed how little the attitude towards Social Media has changed within business. Much of the visible discussion about ROI for Social Media is focused on arbitrary “value of a fan” figures, engagement, conversation and raw fan, like, retweet and follower metrics. Revenue and cost rarely get discussed.

What is the ROI of Trolls?

Return on Investment is actually a very straightforward concept. An old textbook from university defines it as “a ratio of required costs and perceived benefits of a project or an application” (King, Lee & Viehland, 2004 p. 569). At its simplest you measure what goes into a project or business process, be it cash, time spent by employees and other resources, and compare that to what the business gets out of it. It is practically gamification, where businesses keep score on what what is working and what is not by the numbers in the bottom line.

Finding the ROI of a Telephone

One of the persistent memes dogging the discussion compares finding the ROI for Social Media to establishing a return for using now ubiquitous, common technology. Kind of like this remark seen bearing the #SXSMROI hastag:

 Asking if there is ROI for Social Media is like asking if there is an ROI of the telephone or a pencil.

It is a witty statement and fits into Twitter’s 140 character limit. It is also wrong. You can find the ROI of a telephone, or a pencil for that matter. Service and technology companies such as Intel (PDF) think so. Aside from the savings of switching to a VoIP system, Intel’s case study also outlined another business benefit for adopting their systems: productivity gains. The return on a project is not always in creating a new revenue stream.

The worst part of the analogy quoted above is that practically every piece of technology in common use now at some point had to be shown to have value. From the phone, to mainframe computers, desktop machines, mobiles and the Internet.

Business systems often provide more benefits to the bottom line than just directly generating revenue or cutting costs. In many cases it is how these tools create efficiencies internally or assist in acquiring and serving customers that creates the return for the business.

Meet Ms Revenue and Mr Expenditure

There are two things fundamental to running a business and ROI; revenue and expenditure.  Most organisations attempt to link expenditure to a source of revenue, either directly such as in the case of marketing, or indirectly in the case of business functions such as customer service and HR.

A successful, sustainable business

The one simple, inescapable fact at the centre of this discussion is that Social Media projects cost money. Either as cash for supporting marketing, tools and external experts, or the money spent on the wages of those involved with posting content, creating cat-themed memes and responding to customers.

Just don't cross the streams

It is important that posting cat photos and building love and trust contributes to the business’ bottom line. Knowing what works for the business makes it possible to decide if the marketing department should spend their time drafting tweets or creating another eDM. It means knowing if customer service staff should stick to the phones, or be trained to respond to questions on Facebook. Pouring money and resources into projects with no return is not a sustainable practice, no matter how many Twitter followers a brand might gain or the number of happy Facebook fans who have won an iPad.

Finding the Return on Social Media

Tools like Google’s Social Reports in Analytics and Assisted Conversion funnels do make it easier to track the effect of a Social Media campaign on online activity and sales even if they don’t reveal much about other channels. However measuring the return on engaging in Social Media for business is not limited to last click attribution and cross channel sales tracking.

Social Media is more than just another marketing channel. Because of the nature of the platforms, an organisation’s Social Media spaces will inevitably be used by the community as they see fit. Social Media sites such as Pinterest and Facebook have more in common with shared public spaces than dedicated media channels.

One of the more common ways an organisation’s audience appropriate these spaces is to expedite customer service and to make general enquiries. In fact a number of very successful Social Media initiatives have taken advantage of this behaviour, such as Dell with @DellCares.

Because of the ease of disseminating information and the access they can give to a pre-existing audience, Social Media is a natural fit for Business Communication and a powerful way to serve customers directly. These functions often do not directly generate revenue but they still create value for the business.

For example, while I was with Greyhound Australia the brand’s Facebook page was often used to respond to product questions and customer service enquiries, in addition to normal promotional activity. By responding to questions in public in a shared space the brand was able to communicate with the person who ask as well as others with the same question.

Under normal circumstances using online spaces to address customer queries helped to improve customer service in general, it was during extraordinary events where it created the most value. During the Queensland floods Greyhound’s online spaces, including Facebook, were important for keeping customers informed, and managing direct customer enquiries. It made it possible to communicate with customers directly and en masse.

Using online tools such as the company’s website and Social Media spaces made it easier for customers to find the information they needed to be aware of changes to services and manage the load experienced in other customer service channels. While this is an extreme example, it was an expansion of existing practices in response to an extraordinary situation. Facebook was already used as a communications and customer service channel as well as a marketing tool, and the return on the time and resources invested were measured as such.

Love, Trust, Engagement and Staying in the Black

Social Media projects for business will be treated like any other. Goals will be set, processes put in place and KPIs assigned. Until someone discovers a way to pay for servers with love and trust, some form of economic benefit will be expected, which in turn will be weighed against the costs associated with the project.

The idea that Social Media is different really should be dead and buried by now. Developing and managing online communities takes effort, and in a commercial setting, this costs money. Likes and retweets don’t pay bills, and at some point, people need to get paid.

King, D, Lee, J & Viehland, D 2004. Electric Commerce; A Managerial Perspective, Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.

Getting the right audience

Like Facebook, LinkedIn offers advertisers a lot of choices for selecting the perfect audience. Advertising can be targeted by general demographic information to job titles, groups and even the company the potential audience is employed by. Sometimes with so much choice, choosing which tools not to use can be as important as selecting those that you do. You can read the full version of Getting your LinkedIn Audience Right over at Search Engine People now.

Advertising on LinkedIn has more in common with advertising on Facebook than AdWords. Like Facebook, LinkedIn allows its advertisers to target ads based on demographic and personal information, and not current activity such as search. AdWords is more about the task the user is currently engaged in, with a few other variables available to limit reach and limit the ads to a more potentially productive audience.

Read the full version here.

Quick Hide the Typewriters!

Online, reading and news are doing OK. It’s just writing and journalism as a profession that seems to be in trouble. Specifically journalism, at least according to the current narrative. The big problem is that writing is easy, and with the Internet, publication is even simpler.

Most of the developed world is literate and the tools needed to write are very common, from mobile phone handsets to desktop computers, tablets and laptops. The sprawling ecosystem of platforms and media the Internet has spawned means making something available is simple. These days the hard part is having something worth saying, and that someone else will care enough about to share.

Before the Internet, the hard part for a writer was making their work public on some kind of scale in the first place. Getting words onto paper, in bulk, and with access to a distribution network of some kind was hard, very hard. Plus the entire process was in the hands of a relatively small number of gatekeepers who only had so many pages that they needed filled. In turn this allowed them to be as picky with content and writers as their business model allowed, restricting access to a handful of professions who met certain standards or had a specific marketable skill set. However, the Internet has changed this, and since the earliest days, creating and sharing content online has been endemic and a major part of the identity of those that use these platforms, from the RFC forum all the way through to Pinterest.

Arguing for Value in the Race to the Bottom

Making content available to the public is easy, far easier than being interesting or articulate. The ability to press ‘publish’, ‘post’ or ‘update’ has no relation to being able to spell, or being interesting, or even understandable. It is easy to do, there is no reason for most people not to, and they mostly do it for free, or in some cases with an optimistic expectation of making millions working from home.

When anyone with an Internet connection is potential competition, where does this leave professional writers, and more importantly, the organisations that package and distribute their work? Even narrowing it down to just the articulate and interesting, there are lot of people giving it away for free.

The quality of content created and consumed both online and offline by news organisations, businesses, consumers and other publishing entities is not arguing strongly for the value of a professional content creating class. It is plainly obvious that you don’t need to be a journalist to churn out content or copy and paste a press release. It is not surprising that building a business based on generating huge volumes of low investment content and sticking ads on it has been popular online.

Bulk Content for Bulk Ad Views

The problem is the number of pageviews required to make it work. To generate the interest and get the required attention, new sites and others using content to generate advertising revenue need a lot of divisive, polarising content.  Stuff that provokes an emotive response, headlines that attract clicks and opinions or stories people will want to share. As fast as some legacy media is racing to reach the logical conclusion of this trend, their online-only competition is already there, and doing it cheaper.

A lot of blogs and online news services, from personal blogs to the Huffington Post are accused of lowering the tone of public discourse at the expense of professional writing. In fact, these criticisms have become common place enough to have developed their own collection of predictable tropes. As Arianna Huffington pointed out, “Self-expression the new entertainment”, and it is this trend that has spawned a tidal wave of content posted everywhere from private and public social networks to personal and commercial blogs. Individually they don’t have much of an impact, they don’t scale. What does make a difference is the amount of activity they produce as a group. For every blogger who gives up after their fourth ‘Top Ten Reasons Pants Rock’ post fails to make them internet millions, or walks away from a Tumblr meme blog because their friends don’t share it enough, there are still more who continue to write, post, photoshop, tweet, and so on.

However, to make a play for the mass audience that legacy media is pitched at, they need scale. It is the content farms that have scale, creating masses of content either through aggregation or software tools, or with large teams of underpaid writers churning out short pieces to match a list of targeted search queries. Underpaying for bad content in a way that scales was working so well that it got to the point where search engines had to appear to be doing something once the mainstream press started to criticise the ‘spammy’ search result pages.

Professional Writers versus Professionals Writing

At the other end of the spectrum there are subject matter experts who put their work online. For many, such as scientists, talking directly to the public is an attractive alternative to being misquoted, misrepresented and edited down to a misleading sound byte by journalists from a legacy media channel. There are other benefits for professionals in publishing online and reaching their audience directly, and none of them have to be getting paid per blog post or AdSense revenue.

The critical thing is that there is no shortage of accessible, findable content and specialist content online. There is a large number of experts from a diverse range of fields either already producing content as a part of their job, or doing it because they they enjoy it on their own time. Many are actively engaged in their work and their professional community, and can reach laypeople who are interested in their thoughts and fields of expertise without needing a journalist to act as an intermediary.

Generalists for Cash and Experts for Free

Just as there are a lot of people sharing good quality content just because they can, there is a lot of content created for reasons other than a direct financial return, some out of pure altruism. There are many bloggers and other creators that happily give their content away as fast as the audience will take it because it will help them make money through other means. Their written work might help when pitching for new projects, or build a public profile, sell books, t-shirts, events or just get a new job.

Left in the Middle

Where do the ‘genuine writers’ fit in this world? Content written for broad appeal does not seem to require a lot of skill or attract much return, and material written about niche topics created by subject area experts is easier than ever to find. Writers in general, and journalists in particular, do not seem to fit either end of this spectrum, if literacy and access to a printing press and a newspaper brand is all they can offer.

Professional writers who only provide a link between the information and the means of publication are an artefact of the economics of scarcity. Scarcity of printers, scarcity of platforms and distribution, and even a scarcity of the skills needed to use these tools. In the past to participate in the media you had to be chosen, be employed by an entity that controlled the means of production. It was easier to get picked if you were a professional writer, and because the industry could only support so many writers, most of them seemed to be generalists. With a few exceptions, it was not economical to support someone full time just to write about a niche subject area.

Now you don’t need to be chosen to reach an audience. It does not have to be a full time job just to get access to a good distribution network. There are more writers specialising in obscure topic areas than before, and it is also easier and cheaper to get mass, general, click bait content produced or to aggregate press releases and news feeds. On the whole, journalism appears to be caught in the middle. No longer vital for collecting and interpreting expert opinion, and faced with the falling value of general content. The future demands that writers offer something more than the ability to spell, and the luck to work for someone who owns a printing press.

Anything but the links!

This week Google’s search blog, Inside Search, announced a number of changes that were rolled out during February. Apparently one of them was about links. Unsurprisingly, this change was the one that received the most immediate attention, and generated the largest number of blog posts. Which is not too bad for a single paragraph that really does not say a lot:

Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

More than just about a Link

Despite first impressions, there were other changes in the list of 40 updates. These include some related to image search, query freshness, spiking topics and news, as well as a range of language and product updates. While links were only mentioned in one update, image search was in four, and content freshness and emerging queries were covered in five.

Fresher, Timelier Results?

It was hard not to see intent in the changes relating to finding fresh content and identifying emerging search trends. With Search, plus Your World, and how Google has used Twitter in the past to power a real time search product, it is easy to assume that Google may be looking at using social and behaviour signals to modify rankings on a short time scale. The main updates that seemed to fit this were:

• Interval based history tracking for indexing. [project codename “Intervals”] This improvement changes the signals we use in document tracking algorithms.
• Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.
• Fresher images. [launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.
• Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
• Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.

Once you assume that because these updates appear in the same document they must be related, the changes taken together seem to hint at refining systems for making search more responsive. The updates appear to touch on three different systems: methods for finding new content, methods for assessing a document’s changes over time and a method for identifying emergent search trends.

Building a Better Google News Service

To leave assumptions behind and take a flying leap towards baseless speculation, obviously Google intends to create a search experience capable of responding to spiking topics by altering the temporal range of the content in its results. A search query like ‘Brisbane Floods’ would be a good example.

Spiking Search Query

Prior to January 2011 the best results for this query would have been historic references, most likely to the 1974 floods. To be relevant and useful, the content would not have to be recent, and the results would not need to be temporally sensitive. In January 2011 that changed, and as the Brisbane River broke its banks, the 1974 floods were no longer the most relevant result for that query.

Anecdotally in Brisbane the sites in the SERPs did change in response to new information being generated, and to social media activity around certain sites driving link creation. This process occurred over a few days as the older content was replaced by news and a few purpose-built pages responding to the event. Imagine if Google could respond faster, and on a more personalised level?

Speculation isn’t very useful

However that is just speculation, and what’s worse, speculation in a vacuum. Google is on record saying it makes hundreds of changes to their search products every year, and just because a number of these changes happen close to each other in time does not mean they are related. It is worth reading Google’s blog post, even just to be aware of some of the more specific updates, such as the International Update to Shopping Snippets and improvements to their flight search product.

However, concluding that link building has changed forever on the basis of one vague paragraph of text, or concluding that Google will become a responsive news service, might be reaching a little too far.

Intent and Keyword Research on Search Engine People

Search engine marketing is one of the very few channels where you can target people by their intent. The keywords someone uses to interact with a search engine can reveal as much about how close they are to buying as it does about what it is they are trying to find.

Keyword research needs to not only go past identifying which vanity one or two word term has the most searches per month or competition in AdWords. There needs to some thought given to how the keywords targeted match the site and business’s types of conversions.

Why someone is using a certain search query is just as important as how often it is used. Search is one of the few marketing channels where it is possible to target people by their intent rather than an arbitrary demographic grouping. Planning keyword research and optimization strategies to maximize views over targeting likely leads is ignoring one of the most powerful aspects of search engine marketing.

Read more of “Why” Matters More in Keyword Research on Search Engine People.

According to Google, the three big features will be:

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

Google has not provided a single universal search experience for a while, so the first of these three features is not as significant as it would seem. The second and third however are a different story.

Profiles in Search

This is probably going to the most significant feature in terms of actual user adoption, and it is also in line with the steps that Google has been taking towards becoming a key identity provider online. Search is as much a destination in itself as it is a directory, and Google is close to filling the same role as portal sites like Yahoo! used to in the 1990′s.

Adding the profiles to which the user is connected and those they might want to add to their Circles is an important piece of social functionality for Google+. On sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, the people search tools have been one of the tools driving the growth of their users’ networks.

Making Google+ profiles more visible in the results and autocomplete also creates social proof for uncommitted users that Google+ is used, and I suspect will encourage people to use it more.

People and Pages

The third feature being introduced with Google+’s closer integration with Google’s search results is the inclusion of personal profiles as  results in search, outranking older, more active and ostensibly more linked-to web properties. The importance of personal Google+ profiles in search was hinted at earlier with Google’s replacing ‘+’ with quotations for marking a word as exact match.

Google+ on a logged out vanity search

Considering how Google has used YouTube, Google Places and a number of other services within their search results, this should not have taken anyone by surprise.

How well Google+ profiles are performing in search compared to other web properties has certainly drawn criticism, although not much astonishment, from the more cynical commentators online.

There is a positive side to the performance of Google+ content in search, and that is in reputation management. It is another way to get content ranking for a brand or name that could outrank less than favourable results and bury them.

With More Social Content comes Greater Transparency

As well as the new social features, Google also announced a number of changes to their interface to give the user greater control over their search experience and to create more transparency in how the social content is used in search. The search engine also made it easy for users to remove personalised results, which feature is accessible through a toggle button:

That means no results from your friends, no private information and no personalization of results based on your Web History. This toggle button works for an individual search session, but you can also make this the default in your Search Settings. We provide separate control in Search Settings over other contextual signals we use, including location and language.

Crowding the Social Bandwagon

The most interesting reaction to Google’s Search, plus Your World came from Twitter, who seemed understandably annoyed. Even though the two companies parted ways, Search, plus Your World became an opportunity for Twitter to state their concerns on how as a “result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone” to find the breaking news and event information that Twitter has become known for.

Google+ could become a competitor for Twitter as a realtime news provider and aggregator by displaying breaking information inline with organic search results, and it is interesting to see Twitter publicly take a shot at Google over this. However, it has been a while since their content agreement expired without renewal, leaving Google’s realtime search tools dead just as Google+ was being launched.

With Search, plus Your World, it seems that Twitter is concerned that Google might be able to revive the functionality of realtime search, without having to enter another deal with their own social network.

Social without the Site

For Google+ to pay off for Google, it does not need to replace Facebook or Twitter. To succeed as an identity provider it just needs profiles, and for its users to remain logged in while using other Google products.

The search results themselves are shaping up to be the most important part of Google+, with the addition of everything from friends, personal photos and shared content, to potentially realtime updates on subjects of interest (Remember Sparks? Maybe they will come into this at some point). Google+ is not about being a destination in itself, and frankly, it does not need to be.

Initial reactions to SSL Search were mixed

SSL search has been live for over a month now, and for some industries, the percentage os search terms ‘not provided’ keeps on going up. Ironically just as data driven decision making becomes more important to marketing professionals, one of the more valuable sources of information has become compromised.

Keywords are far more revealing about what a visitor is trying to do, what their interests are and how they describe products or ideas. Segmenting traffic by the words they used to arrive on the site can reveal a lot about how effective a campaign is through changes in campaign terms, identifying returning customers through navigational terms like the use of brands and URLs as queries, and also the success or otherwise of search optimisation campaigns.

Read all of Google’s secure search and missing data on MarketingMag.com.au

How and why search queries will die

Search engines do not stop changing, from how they process and understand information to the end user’s experience. The evolution of search is driven as much by new technology, changing user expectations as it is by optimisation activity from the content creators.

It is the ubiquity of smart devices and mobile computing that will generate some of the more interesting innovation in this space. There is no good reason to confine search to the browser, and every reason for it to become a service, an invisible layer between the user and the rest of the world, a part of the devices and other software tools we use, and not a destination.

Typing is so last century. Formulating a query to suit an algorithm to get a relevant result is a relic from last decade, and clicking on links to actually get what you wanted is a failure in user experience. Web based search engines are a result of the constraints of technology, their user experience model a relic of static HTML directories and a less responsive internet. However a lot has changed in the last few years, and both the queries and their results have changed.

Read more of How and Why Search Queries Will Die on Search Engine People.

Rank first in Google! Or Last, maybe.

The other week Google introduced a new ad position on their results pages, at the bottom of the page. Reporting in AdWords will only display two ad positions, top and other, grouping impressions on ads at the bottom of the page with those generated from ads to the side. The ‘Top vs. Side’ segment became ‘Top vs. Other’.

In the blog post announcing the launch the change was explained as providing benefits for the user experience without compromising the advertisers’ interests:

In many cases, we have found that displaying ads below search results fits better into the user’s flow as they scan the page from top to bottom. On average, this placement performed better than side ads in terms of click-through rate in our tests.

This change was not made without testing and enough data to give a clear indication of what the likely effect on the market would be. Ads have been seen in this position in a number of different markets prior to the announcement. Pre-launch testing is not all that surprising from Google and has been seen many times in the past.

Movement in the SERPS

Is there any value to the advertiser in appearing at the bottom of the search engine results page (SERP)? It is almost certain that, now that it is launched, Google found no problem for themselves, however their interests do not always correspond to that of their users, or customers. Adding ad positions below the fold has even attracted the attention of non-digital marketers, and how this change and the uncertainty it introduces would affect the perceived value of an AdWords click.

Click throughs by Average Position on the first page

Graph from Click Throughs in the Search Results

A lot of data has been graphed and blog posts written on how organic listings below the first two do not receive a lot of traffic. The difference between the click through rate of AdWords ads positioned above the organic results and those to the right is significant. Putting ads below the tenth spot certainly doesn’t seem like it would increase the number of clicks each ad could get. But maybe that is not the point.

Splitting ad positions between the top and the bottom of the SERP differentiates the two positions further than between the top and the side. The top results will appear less cluttered with fewer links, even with the addition of more Google Places content.

For the AdWords advertiser, the perceived and probably actual value of a top three position also increases. With additional ads moved to the bottom of the page, the amount of above the fold screen real estate available is reduced.

Differentiated Impressions

Like the introduction of above the fold bidding on the content network, creating further differentiation between advertising inventory in AdWords creates additional products. Moving some of this inventory below the fold creates a greater difference in value, and potentially intensifies competition for one class of product.

The cost for placements above and below the fold will change as a consequence of this. The cost of traffic for placements consistently appearing below the fold will probably increase. Decreased visibility will affect their click through rate (CTR), and as a result negatively affect Quality Score (QS).

Placements at the top of the page will probably benefit from this. What one position loses in exposure the other should gain. The Quality Scores for the top placements should improve, if they receive a greater share of the advertising traffic for any given SERP. To what degree this will result in a lower cost per click will depend on what, if anything, changes in bidding behaviour from the other participants in the market.

The most likely outcome from Google’s latest change to how AdWords ads are displayed is an increase in revenue per impression. Creating greater differentiation between advertising inventory will encourage advertisers to modify their tactics and spending to maximise impressions above the fold, possibly raising the average cost per click. Moving one kind of ad position to a position below the fold will increase the value and yield on those that remain above, while the almost inevitable decline in CTR and QS will increase their cost per click.

Update: Google announced in a blog post titled New ways to take action on top of page bid estimates new tools to automate bidding to appear specifically above the fold. While it is not like the options introduced with above the fold bidding on the content network, the effect is the same.

Social Media and a Fractured Narrative

Post-purchase care won’t save you because once it is online, spidered and shareable, it is too late. Customers broadcast the entire purchase process from research onwards through social media in real time, online, to all their friends, and the search engines, it is inevitable that they will post the good and the bad. When every frustration and problem encountered in dealing with a brand is put online for all to see as it happens, giving them a refund doesn’t help as much as it used to. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, even if the original problem has been dealt with, their frustration is still going to be there, out in public and sometimes even in Google’s index.

Customer Care Online isn't Retroactive

Both Google and Bing take travel seriously. Google has released products like Hotel Finder and a flight search feature and Bing Travel is continually featured in the search engine’s official blog. Even as both major search engines show more and more portal-like tendencies, there is a large number of other sites providing reviews and information and hosting communities of travellers or travel blogs. Travel is a big business, and one where the market has an insatiable desire for information, especially for the longer, more expensive trips.

Read the full Post-purchase care won’t save you post on Marketing Magazine online.